Dendritic Cell Vaccines have been around for over 20 years but early results suggested they had an effect in only 12% of brain cancer patients; but now in a new 4 country clinical trial, Dendritic Cell Vaccine (DCVax-L) seems to give some patients over 7 years of extra survival, fulfilling the early promise of this form of immunotherapy for brain tumours.
Using Temozolomide with Dendritic Cell Vaccine (DCVax®-L)
For patients with GBM, standard treatment involves surgery, radiotherapy and temozolomide. Here, the researchers announced results of their Phase III trial where an autologous tumour-lysate-pulsed Dendritic Cell Vaccine (DCVax®-L) was added to the standard programme.
In this study patients after surgery received either Temozolomide plus the vaccine, or Temozolomide plus a placebo.
However, where recurrence occurred all patients were allowed to have the Dendritic Cell vaccine.
The Intention to Treat (ITT) mean Overall Survival time was shown to be 23.3 months from surgery.
For patients with methylated MGMT, taking both TMZ and the vaccine, mean Overall Survival increased to 34.7 months, (TMZ is primarily for brain cancer that is methylating). Almost half (46.4%) survived more than three years. Of these survivors, predicted overall survival is 88.2 months.
Only 2.1 % of those treated with the DC vaccine had an adverse effect, and this level was almost identical to standard treatment rates.
Dr. Linda Liau, was the lead author of the study. She is also chair of the neurosurgery department at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.
Liau was particularly excited about the results saying, “What’s particularly impressive about these immunotherapy trials is that there seems to be a population of about 20 to 30 percent of patients who are living significantly longer than expected — the long tail of the survival curve.”
The study was done in 4 countries (USA, UK, Canada, Germany) and involved 80 sites and over 286 patients.
It should be noted that a tissue sample is essential in order to prepare this Dendritic Cell vaccine.
These first results were published in the Journal of Translational Medicine (1).
Go to: Dendritic Cell vaccines – personalised immunotherapy
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Reference
- https://translational-medicine.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12967-018-1507-6